Highlights
- The upcoming Assassin's Creed Mirage is generating buzz and the series aims to cater to all types of fans on every platform.
- The Assassin's Creed series has a common issue of unnecessary time jumps that break player immersion and need to be handled more carefully.
- Future Assassin's Creed games should show the passage of time through changes in characters, settings, and environments, similar to Red Dead Redemption 2.
The Assassin's Creed franchise has had a pretty good run so far, and it doesn't look like that's going to stop anytime soon. While fans are split on Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla's switch to an RPG-focused approach, those players will hopefully be catered to with the upcoming Assassin's Creed Mirage, which has just gotten quite a bit of buzz coming off of some recent previews. And with more projects in the works than ever before, it's a very real possibility that the Assassin's Creed series will be able to cater to all types of fans on every platform moving forward.
But that doesn't mean that the same old Assassin's Creed formula should be carried through to the next generation of the franchise. Both the original action-adventure AC games, and the newer AC RPGs have their fair share of issues, and one of the more consistent narrative issues across both eras is their shared affinity for unnecessary time jumps, breaking the player's immersion in a few ways.
Future Assassin's Creed Games Should Show the Passage of Time
The Assassin's Creed franchise has a bad habit of including lengthy time jumps in the middle of its games, and that's especially prevalent in the early games in the series. While the first Assassin's Creed takes place over the course of just a few months, Assassin's Creed 2 takes place over a few decades. While this gives the story a grand scope and lets players see a wide array of historical moments and figures, it can end up being a tad immersion-breaking.
A great example of this can be found fairly early in the game, when Ezio is training with his uncle Mario. While the game technically states that this training took Ezio several years to complete, there's little evidence in-game that a time jump really occurred, with Ezio's family staying in the exact same spot the whole time and the environment looking unchanged. An even more egregious example of this comes toward the end of Assassin's Creed 2, when a 10-year gap occurs between assassination missions in Venice.
Assassin's Creed 2 is far from the only offender, however. Assassin's Creed 3 follows a similar approach, with Connor's assassination list taking him an entire decade to work through, seemingly only so that he can participate in all the major events of the American Revolutionary War. Though Connor's hairstyle changes slightly, that's about all that signifies the passage of time in-game, which is something that future Assassin's Creed games really need to work out.
While having time jumps in an Assassin's Creed game isn't inherently bad or lazy, it needs to be handled with more care in the future. Players should be able to see a definite change in the game's characters, and setting that properly denote the passage of time. Characters need to age naturally over the course of the game, as well as change emotionally to reflect the game's events. The game's environment should also be gradually altered over time, with structures being built and demolished over time and the landscape changing naturally.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was a great example of this, with players being able to spot buildings under construction in areas like Valentine and Saint Denis at the start of the game, and upon returning to them in the epilogue - set years later - they're complete. This not only makes an open-world feel like a real, living, breathing place, but also strengthens the game's immersion through actual gameplay, allowing the player to interact with these new structures. Hopefully, Assassin's Creed starts to slow things down a bit, giving players a chance to see how parts of the world evolve over time.